Childhood hunger is a nice, safe issue. No politician can be against hungry children, and we are told that the U.S. faces a child hunger problem of massive proportions. Advocacy groups repeat over and over that 16.2 million children (one in five) “struggle with hunger in the United States.” Television appeals show dispirited children going to bed hungry.

Childhood hunger and nutrition are one of the constants of political discourse. While the Super Committee stalemates, Congress debates whether pizzas should be counted as a vegetable in school lunch programs. The Occupy Wall Street crowd deplores childhood hunger as “violence against children.” Liberals complain that Rush Limbaugh jokes about childhood poverty. Sinister pizza, cola, and salt lobbyists block valiant efforts to make school lunches healthier.

Statistics that become part of our folklore should raise suspicion. When we dig into them, they are usually wrong. I cite as examples Bill Clinton’s “100,000 new cops on the street” or the “miserly pay of teachers.”

The one-in-five childhood hunger figure should raise red flags for three reasons.

First, studies of poor households show that almost half own their own homes, three quarters own a car, and almost all have a color television. The American poor seem to have money for things other than food for their children, if the one-in-five statistic is to be believed.

Second, advocacy groups (with Michelle Obama as a leading spokesperson) now appear to have decided that the problem is childhood obesity, not hunger. The children, especially of the poor, are not going to bed hungry. They are eating too much of the wrong foods.

Third, if the one-in-five statistic is correct, the public food stamps and school free lunch programs must be colossal failures. Despite their wide reach into poor communities, they apparently leave more than thirty percent of school children “struggling with hunger.”

Where does the one-in-five figure come from and what does it really measure?

It turns out that the official arbiter of family nutrition is the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Its annual survey classifies families as “food secure”, “food insecure”, and “very low food secure.” It publishes no direct measure of “hunger,” only of what it calls “food security.” The details of the survey are found in the statistical appendix to the annual survey – a document that few read.

The USDA classifies households as “food insecure” if they report worrying about not having enough money to buy food, if they substitute cheaper foods, skip meals, or eat less for financial reasons. If they do these things frequently, they are classified as “very low food secure.”

Slightly over 21 percent of households are “food insecure.” This is the one-in-five statistic we hear from the media and advocacy groups.

The one-in-five figure is for all households, many of which consist only of adults. If we limit the sample to households with children, ten percent of them are classified as food insecure. If any group wishes to use the broadest possible measure of children’s “struggle for food,” the ten percent figure would be it.

Notably, weekly spending on food by the median “food insecure” household is 95 percent of the cost of the USDA Thrifty Food Plan – the minimum cost of an affordable and healthy diet. It seems that another five cents on the dollar separates 16.2 million hungry children from a healthy diet.

Not publicized by the childhood hunger lobby are the USDA’s most direct measures of childhood hunger. They reveal that between one and two percent of families “cut the size of children's meals” or report that “children were hungry” or “skipped meals.” And only one tenth of one percent of families reported that “children did not eat for a whole day.” These findings do not suggest, to say the least, an epidemic of childhood hunger. The USDA’s most direct measures yield a childhood hunger rate between one and two in a hundred, not one in five.

A wealthy nation like the United States should have no hungry children. The USDA figures show that we are close to this ideal. That “food insecure” families spend almost enough to buy the government’s suggested minimum balanced diet tells us that the problem is poor food choice, not hunger per se.

Currently 31.7 million children, or thirty percent of all school children, receive free school lunches. Almost every child in “food insecure” families participates. The free school lunch program has become another middle class entitlement. It feeds kids primarily from “food secure” homes.

The free school lunch program now justifies itself as a way to correct children’s bad dietary habits, I guess acquired at home. Now the only thing standing between children and a healthy diet are the rascally junk food companies and their DC lobbyists.

I am a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, and energy fellow and Cullen Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. I am also a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research Berlin. My specialties are Russia and Comparative Ec...